European visitors were often astonished that the most powerful men in the Ottoman Empire had been born Christian peasants. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Habsburg ambassador to Suleiman's court in the 1550s, wrote home that among the Turks high office went to men of ability and merit rather than birth, and he contrasted this pointedly with the aristocratic privilege of his own world. He exaggerated, but he had noticed something real. The Ottoman system for staffing the state was unlike anything in Christian Europe.

The sultan's servants

At its heart was the devshirme, or "collection." Every few years officials visited Christian villages, mostly in the Balkans, and selected boys, usually in their early teens. The devshirme was a levy of Christian boys, who were converted to Islam and trained to serve the sultan as soldiers or officials. Muslim families were generally exempt, as were Jews, although Bosnian Muslims were later allowed to send sons. The most promising boys entered the palace school, where they studied languages, law, religion, warfare and court manners. The rest worked on Anatolian farms to learn Turkish and then joined the army.

Recruits became kul, servants or slaves of the sultan, a status that combined great opportunity with total dependence. A kul could rise to command an army or govern a province, but his property could be confiscated at his death, and he could be executed without trial on the sultan's order. Some Christian families feared and resented the levy; others, seeing the careers it opened, are reported to have welcomed it. Either way, it took children from their parents by force of law.

The Janissaries

The most famous kul were the Janissaries, from yeni çeri, "new troops." Founded in the fourteenth century, they were the sultan's elite infantry and an early adopter of firearms. The Janissaries were a salaried standing infantry, at a time when most European armies were raised for single campaigns. In their early centuries they lived in barracks, were forbidden to marry and drilled constantly. Their discipline impressed and frightened enemies. Over time, though, they grew in number, gained the right to marry and enter trades, and became a powerful political force in Istanbul.

Land and cavalry

Alongside the salaried troops stood the provincial cavalry, the sipahis, supported by the timar system. A timar gave a cavalryman the right to collect taxes from a piece of land in return for military service, but it did not make him the owner. Most farmland belonged in principle to the state, and the peasants who worked it held secure rights to farm it and pass it on. The sipahi lived in his district, kept order and rode to war with his own armed followers when summoned. The system let the empire field a large army without paying it in cash.

Council, provinces and courts

The government met in the Imperial Council, the Divan, at Topkapı Palace. The grand vizier held the sultan's seal and led the government, while the sultan increasingly watched from behind a grille. Later the grand vizier's offices became known to Europeans as the Sublime Porte, a name that came to stand for the Ottoman government itself. The empire was divided into large provinces under governors, subdivided into districts.

Justice ran through a separate hierarchy of religious scholars, the ulema. In each district a judge, the kadi, applied both sharia and kanun and also handled much local administration. At the top stood the chief mufti, the sheikh ul-Islam, whose legal opinions could approve or condemn the sultan's policies. Kadi courts were open to non-Muslims, and Christians and Jews often used them, sometimes because a kadi's ruling was easier to enforce than one from their own community's courts.

The circle of justice

Ottoman writers explained the logic of the whole system with an old Near Eastern idea. The circle of justice taught that the ruler's power depended on prosperous subjects, and their prosperity depended on justice: no state without an army, no army without revenue, no revenue without thriving subjects, and no thriving subjects without a just ruler. In practice this meant ordinary subjects could petition the Divan against abusive officials, and many did.

Worked example: the career of Sokollu Mehmed Pasha

Follow one life through the system. Sokollu Mehmed was born around 1505 to a Serbian Orthodox family in Bosnia and was taken in the devshirme as a youth. He passed through the palace school, served in the sultan's household and rose to become admiral, then governor, then commander. In 1565 he became grand vizier and held the post for some fourteen years under three sultans, Suleiman, Selim II and Murad III, effectively running the empire for long stretches.

His story shows several things at once. First, social mobility: a village boy from a conquered Christian people reached the summit of power. Second, ties of origin survived conversion. In 1557 the Serbian Orthodox patriarchate of Peć was restored, and its first patriarch was Makarije Sokolović, widely believed to be his relative. Sokollu also endowed the famous bridge over the Drina at Višegrad, near his birthplace. Third, his power rested entirely on favor. In 1579 he was stabbed to death by a man posing as a petitioner, and his faction lost ground under a sultan who had come to distrust him. The system rewarded talent, but the talented remained the sultan's servants, owned in a sense that no rank could erase.